Human rights vanish for people who lack their own sovereign government

Evidence

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them—whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are. Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these human rights. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The nation-state’s inability to protect the stateless lets persecutors impose their values; Deprivation of rights compounds irreversibly once a person is rendered stateless; National emancipation came to be seen as a precondition for human rights (+14 more)

Broader Connections